Question

ok so what I am trying to do is manually handle my assets when using express. What I mean is that I do not what to have to have every stylesheet/javascript file on every page. So I wanted to be able to specify in each route whether I wanted to use another javascript file or not. Ex:

app.get('/testing',function(req,res,next){
      assets.addJS('my-javascript-file');
      res.render('testing');
});

So now when the template goes to render I want all of those javascript files that have been added in a local variable. I do not want to pass them on each call to render because I will want to add javascript in other places and may not necessarily need to send anything to the template which would cause me not to pass it by accident. Another thing that I want to implement is caching. I know by default it sends back the 304 not modified once it has the asset but I dont even want it making that request so I was hoping to do a query string on the files when they are output with maybe the last time they were modified and that way if I change them it will automatically tell the users browser to get the newest files but other than that it will cache them saving me bandwidth / requests (amazon s3 charges for these). If anyone can point me in the right direction or if there is already a plugin out there for this please let me know. Thanks.

Answer 1

You could build an asset manager around this:

app.get(function(req, res) {
  res.locals.files = [ 'somefile.js', 'somefile2.js' ];
  res.render('someview');
});

The view would just create multiple script files.

head
  each file in files
    script(src=base_url + '/' + file)

If you want to merge the files into one request you probably need to extend this even more. You could create a route that can take an array of files and merges them on each request. You can serve files with res.sendFile. This will take care of all the headers and caching if I remember correctly.